When Activism Turns Gentle: The Infrastructure of Kindness

When did caring about the world start to feel like drowning?

Was it the summer the Pantanal wetlands burned and the sky in São Paulo turned black at 3pm? Or maybe earlier, the year I stopped seeing insects splattered on windshields and realized I couldn't remember when that had stopped happening?

By my early-twenties, I'd developed this habit: I'd read about another catastrophe, feel the weight of it settle into my chest, then... nothing. Just static. The problems were so massive, so entangled with systems I couldn't touch, that my brain would simply shut down. I wasn't alone in this. Most people I know live in some version of this loop: care deeply, feel powerless, retreat.

Here's what I started noticing though: these problems aren't just big.

They're big in a way that protects them. The Amazon loses forest the size of entire cities every month, and the ranchers profiting from it write environmental policy. When the system and its destruction are this entangled, where do you even push?

The scale isn't accidental. When everything feels too big to touch, we may stop trying to touch anything.

Twenty meals every Thursday

While I sat refreshing the same news sites in a loop—another fire, another flood, another species count dropping—my grandfather was in his kitchen.

Thin and tall, white hair and beard, beret on his head like he'd never stopped being that union militant from the 80s. Cigar smoke curling up toward the ceiling. The Rolling Stones playing from his old radio. Hands steady despite the arthritis, measuring rice into plastic containers. Slicing vegetables he'd bought at the morning market. Steam rising from pots of beans he'd started soaking the night before.

Twenty meals. Every Thursday. The same worn cutting board. The same careful portioning. The smell of garlic and bay leaves filling the small kitchen.

I remember thinking: what's the point? This doesn't solve homelessness. It doesn't challenge the economic system that creates it. It's just... twenty meals. Twenty people. One old man who looks like he should be planning revolutions, making lunch instead.

But he's been doing this for seventeen years.

The rise of the quiet change makers

Once I stopped looking for revolutions, I started seeing revolutionaries. They were in places I hadn't thought to look. Not leading movements or building organizations. Just showing up, consistently, to work that looked too small to matter.

In 2018, a handful of residents in Morro da Formiga looked at the unused hillside land above their homes in Rio's North Zone and saw something other than waste space.

They planted vegetables. Built raised beds from recycled plastic bottles. Started teaching kids from the local municipal school about agroecology. They called it Espaço Formiga Verde. No social media campaign. No press release about food justice. Just neighbors who wanted fresh food and figured they could grow it themselves.

What I didn't know then, what took years of watching projects like this, is how these small decisions compound.

Here's what actually happened in Formiga: The garden led to water management. Residents who'd been managing natural springs on the hillside for decades (long before the city provided water infrastructure) started coordinating more formally. Someone who knew about composting from their family in Minas Gerais started teaching it. Kids who learned to plant vegetables started measuring trees for Rio's urban forestry program. The hillside became a classroom—an informal lab for regenerative practices that no one had planned from the top.

Similar patterns keep appearing: Detroit built 2,500 gardens after bankruptcy. Havana grew food when Cuba couldn't import it. Paris and Singapore turned rooftops into farms. Different cities, same instinct: build the infrastructure you need when the system can't provide it.

These people were showing up. Transforming abandoned lots into gardens, eroding hillsides into forests, despair into the kind of work you can actually hold in your hands.

The alternatives spread not through campaigns but through the most unglamorous practice imaginable: maintaining the same plot of land, week after week, year after year, until the garden changes how neighbors relate to each other, until a hillside becomes stable enough that kids can learn to measure its trees.

My grandfather with his seventeen years of Thursday meals. These gardens with their community work sessions and water societies and plastic bottle planters. The quiet accumulation of alternatives that nobody reports on but everyone nearby depends upon.

I started visiting a woman in Rio who makes açaí bowls on her street corner. She doesn't post them on social media. No delivery app. Just a handmade sign. She's been doing it for twelve years, and somehow every kid in the neighborhood has grown up eating them. She charges almost nothing, sources her açaí from a cooperative in Pará, and knows every customer by name.

One afternoon she told me: "My family has not gone hungry this year."

This quiet work is happening everywhere.

From confrontation to cultivation

The lunch rush at Sunflower Seed, a vegan buffet in downtown Curitiba, hits around noon. Construction workers in dust-covered boots line up next to office employees in button-downs. The buffet stretches along one wall: roasted vegetables, vegan feijoada, rice seasoned with turmeric, fresh salads, homemade farofa. Less than four dollars gets you all you can eat. You fill your plate as many times as you want, and you sit at one of the shared tables where strangers become temporary lunch companions.

There are no signs about animal rights on the walls. No pamphlets about factory farming. Just good food at prices that make it easier to eat here than grab fast food down the street.

I started going there years ago, during a period when I was counting coins before buying groceries. Beans and rice at home got monotonous, but I couldn't afford restaurant meals and maintain a vegan diet. Sunflower Seed changed that calculation. For less than the price of a sandwich elsewhere, I could eat as much as I needed: vegetables I wouldn't have bought, grains I didn't know how to prepare, flavors that made me wonder why anyone bothered with the greasy spoon next door.

What struck me wasn't the food itself but how the place worked. The owner—a quiet woman who barely talks about herself—had built the business on three principles: everything plant-based, everything affordable, everything welcoming. No dietary gatekeeping, no activism, no education campaigns. Just: here's good food. Come eat.

She runs a business, competing with other lunch spots, and yet she's probably done more to shift how this city eats than a hundred confrontational campaigns ever could.

She's not trying to dismantle the restaurant industry. She's just making the alternative work so well that people keep coming back.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is exactly that. Not destroy the system, but build something inside it that's too compelling to ignore.

A different fuel source

There are people out there blocking construction equipment to protect forests. Chaining themselves to factory gates. Spending years documenting corporate crimes, filing lawsuits that might take a decade to resolve. Organizing protests knowing they might face arrest, violence, or worse.

I keep meeting versions of the same story: investigators who can't sleep anymore because of what they've documented. Organizers who've been fighting for fifteen years and can't remember the last time they felt joy about their work. Environmental lawyers who win cases and feel nothing because there are fifty more waiting. People running on fury and guilt, burning out how much they gave and how little changed.

The people I've been describing—my grandfather, the residents of Formiga, the restaurant owner—found a different fuel source. Not the fire of righteous anger, but something quieter. Something renewable.

I didn't understand this until the first time I went with my grandfather to deliver meals. We drove to the same spots he'd been visiting for years. At each stop, someone was waiting. I watched faces change when they saw him coming. The way eyes brightened. The way a woman in her seventies touched his arm and said she'd been thinking about him all week. A young man who took the container and then just stood there talking for ten minutes about his week, his struggles, his small victories.

I started showing up when I could. I rescued a dog I found shivering a few blocks from my home, spent three days finding her a home with a family who sends me photos sometimes. I started showing up at a community garden near my house, not running anything, just helping whoever needs an extra pair of hands. Weeding. Watering. Moving soil. Two hours every couple of weeks, working alongside people I barely talk to but somehow feel connected to. I stopped one afternoon to have a drink with a homeless man near my apartment. He'd been there for months and I'd never actually looked at him. We sat on the curb. He told me about growing up in the interior, working construction, the accident that left him unable to work, the slow collapse that followed. Forty minutes of his life I'll never forget.

What makes this sustainable isn't the impact, it's the joy. We aren't sustaining ourselves on hope that the system will change. We're fed by the work itself.

That's the difference. Activism fueled by anger demands results to justify the suffering. This kind of work—the quiet, persistent, unglamorous kind—generates its own energy. You do it because the doing itself is the point.

The infrastructure of kindness

Think about the small things you already do. Not the grand gestures. The small ones.

The way you check on a friend when you haven't heard from them. How you cook extra food and offer it to your neighbor when your neighbor mentioned they've been eating badly.

The way you water the plant outside your building that nobody claims. Stopping to give directions to someone who looks lost instead of pretending you didn't notice. Showing up to that thing every week even though you're tired—the choir practice, the park cleanup, the friend's kid's birthday parties.

You've probably dismissed these as too small to count. I did too.

But here's what I've started noticing: The city is full of people quietly building infrastructure the system doesn't provide. The woman who always brings extra food to the office because she knows someone's struggling. The neighbor who fixes things on the street without asking permission. The person who teaches the skill they know to anyone who asks.

These aren't accidents. They're choices. Small, repeated choices that compound into something the algorithms can't capture and governments can't appropriate.

Next time you feel that drowning feeling—that paralysis when the news becomes too much and the problems feel too big—don't reach for your phone to scroll through more disasters. Notice what's actually within arm's reach. Not metaphorically. Not eventually. Right now, in your physical space, in your actual day.

What needs doing that you could just... do?

Maybe nothing. Maybe you're tapped out and that's fine. But maybe there's something so small you've been dismissing it as pointless. A plant that needs water. A neighbor who could use company. A skill you could teach. A bit of public space that could be better.

We're not waiting for permission or the perfect moment or a guarantee it will matter at scale.

We're just building what we can reach.

This essay was published in VegOut's first magazine edition. You can read the full magazine here.